COMMERCIAL USE

The version of MapCruncher on this page is a research release, with advanced but buggy features, no support, and a license that disallows commercial use.
If you would like to use MapCruncher for a commercial application, please examine the Virtual Earth product team's production release of MapCruncher here:
http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/mapcruncher

Overview

Have you ever looked at satellite photos of a building in Virtual Earth -- and wished you could zoom right in and see its floorplan?
Have you ever used VE to plan a trip across town -- and wanted to seamlessly switch from its road maps to maps of bicycle trails, bus routes, or carpool lanes?
Have you ever wanted to create and publish your own map mashups -- and wished you had a tool to make it easy to integrate a map you care about into Virtual Earth?
With MapCruncher, you can!

The Virtual Earth API allows web developers to supplement Virtual Earth's maps with pushpins and lines.
MapCruncher brings mashups to a whole new level by allowing developers to import entire maps to supplement the existing road and aerial imagery with detailed, application-specific information.
The possibilities are endless:
bicycle maps,
transit maps,
national park maps,
university maps,
antique city maps,
or whatever drawn-to-scale maps you personally find interesting.
You can even augment Virtual Earth with
Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography.
See our Gallery for more examples.

Maps become dramatically more useful when registered to Virtual Earth.
For example, last year, Jeremy moved to Kirkland and wanted to commute to Microsoft by bike.
Jon pointed out the useful
King County bike map, which is available on line in PDF form:

However, we couldn't figure out whether the bike trail crosses Interstate 405 at 60th Street, since the green line for the trail shows a break:

The answer can be found in Virtual Earth's aerial imagery, but it took us nearly 15 minutes to find this point in Virtual Earth, because we could only connect the two maps visually.
Once we crunched the bike map into Virtual Earth's global coordinate system, a click of the mouse took us from the above image of the bike map to this one:

MapCruncher makes it easy to publish maps overlaid on Virtual Earth.
Once you are familar with the tool, it will take you about ten minutes to crunch a new map.
Just find 5 to
10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on Virtual Earth, and
MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate
system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of
image tiles that can be seamlessly mashed up with VE's standard road
or aerial imagery.
It even makes a sample HTML page to show you how to use your mashed-up map.